that the stupid 'gator just lay there and stared, with the light dazzling him. His brain, not much bigger than a pea buried in the pulpy mass within his big flat head, held no thought of danger.

The twin reptile-eyes were perhaps fifty yards away when Nixon first saw them. Now he paddled more slowly, with the rowboat gliding forward soundless as a floating leaf. The grip of his right hand down by the blade of the oar-paddle tightened.

The twin eyes there among the stars on the shining water, held motionless. Presently they were only fifteen or twenty feet away, just to the right now of the uptilted empty bow of the little rowboat. Nixon stopped paddling. Slowly he rested the oar in the bottom of the boat and picked up his shotgun.

At about eight feet, Nixon fired both barrels almost together with a great crashing roar. A hundred yards ahead of him, where the bayou made its bend, there was consternation and terror among the tiny upright shapes gathered there on the soggy bank—a terror that made them scurry with tiny cries; and then, when seemingly they were not hurt by the burst of light and the vast roar, made them stand peering in wonderment at this gigantic drama out there on the water.

Nixon knew nothing of that. He was intent only on the splash where his shot had gone; and he saw that this 'gator did not sink, but was lunging away, off to the right, toward the bank. A big one, he had seen that by the spacing of the eyes and now by the water slick and the splashing as it floundered toward shore. Then he was after it, paddling with all the power of his arms as he bent forward, until in the shallows near the bank, where the mortally wounded reptile was now aimlessly floundering, he came almost on top of it.

In an instant more he was over the rowboat's side, waist deep in the water. There was a thrill to this, the lunging of his hands to grip the writhing, slimy, brainless adversary by the foreleg, threshing ashore with it as skillfully he avoided the snapping jaws, and dangerous swishing tail. An eight foot 'gator. Good enough. Its head was an oozing mass of pulp where his shot had blown into it. Panting, he hauled it onto the soggy bank, darted back to the rowboat for his hatchet; then he had hacked into the base of the reptile's spine where the tail began, cutting into it so that the threshing stopped and the big green-black adversary lay only quivering.

Ralph would be pleased. Now if he could get another one as big as this, and then row back home—

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